Wednesday, January 29, 2014

I have once in my life addressed another as bro, in San
Francisco’s Inner Sunset. I and a fellow motorist converged on a parking space
simultaneously. I was feeling magnanimous that day, and called, “All yours,
bro,” in what I hoped he, a black man, might hear as having been said in a
spirit of brotherhood. “Don’t call me bro,” he snarled, apparently in a spirit
of thinking I was a patronizing cracker asshole.

I regard bro as part of The Great Dumbing Down. Bro is
laconic, except when he gets enough beer in him to make him keep bellowing,
“Whoo-hoo!” He emits a single tear at
the sound of Bob Seger’s “Like a Rock,” as heard in commercials for Chevy
trucks, but otherwise regards expressiveness as effeminate. He affects defiant
slobbishness, exemplified by the backward baseball cap, because…well, that’s
what dudes do, dude! Duh!

My enmity might have something to do with the my always
having been hopeless at regular-guy stuff. Coming of age at a time when
drinking alcohol was roughly tantamount to having the words I’m Uncool tattooed on one’s forehead,
it took me a long while to realize that I don’t like beer, the best of which
tastes to me like something in which you’d pre-soak your laundry. (The worst,
that which the vast majority of bros seem to drink because the bro-defining commercials
make them want to, tastes like beer-flavored soda pop.) Because of its
carbonation, it makes you feel all gaseous when you drink it, and doesn’t get you
drunk unless you drink a great deal of it. I just don’t get it.

As a boy, I loved sports, but was generally awful at them.
Fear of falling off precluded my learning to ride a two-wheeler until eight
years old, as fear of the water kept me from learning to swim until around 15.
I was in neither Cub nor Boy Scouts, and thus had no knowledge of camping. I
have never been hunting, and find the idea of hunting barbaric. My dad, bless
his kind heart, had no shop in which to tinker, while smoking his pipe and murmuring,
“Hmm,” every now again, with malfunctioning household appliances, and if he
had, I’d only have gotten in the way. In my various shop classes in junior high
school — wood, metal, print, and electric — my instructors unanimously frowned
at me disbelievingly, having never witnessed comparable ineptitude. Of
knots,I knew nothing, and in fact
still have trouble with my shoelaces. Later, in high school, I was never one to
gather around the opened hood of a classmate’s car to assess his engine. As for
Ford vs. Chevy, I was without an opinion.

I have never been laconic — tightlipped by reason of
petulance, certainly, but not actually terse because I regarded talking as the
province of womenfolk. I love words, and was always as good with them as I was
rotten with knots or tools. I’m not one to suffer in silence, my conception
being that suffering’s quite bad enough without being able to elicit everyone’s
sympathy. I’ve always hated a challenge, and am not remotely averse to asking
perfect strangers for directions. At my first graphic designer job, in Oakland,
Californa, late in the 20th century, I came to understand that I was
widely perceived as gay because I occasionally described things about which I
was enthused as fabulous, or even magnificent. My closest friends have usually
been women.

There have been times in my life when acquaintances or
colleagues at work have, in a spirit of camaraderie, come at me with a hand
raised on high and the apparent expectation that I would raise my own for them
to slap — to high-five, I think it’s called. I have always felt foolish at such
moments. I tried wearing a baseball cap backward for an hour or two earlier
this century, but felt stupid doing it. When I embrace a male acquaintance I
haven’t seen in a long time, I give it longer than the prescribed two seconds,
and generally dispense with the three quick pats on the back.

I watch lots of sports, as I’ve always done, but not in the
way other men do. If the Minnesota Timberwolves, let’s say, trounce the Lakers,
I in no way feel personally diminished. Nor, in the opposite case, do I feel
validated. I’m actually a little bit embarrassed by the pleasure the San
Francisco 49ers’ victories in their two playoff games have given me, not only
because I haven’t inhabited San Francisco since 1998, but also because I
recognize that the team is made up almost entirely of mercenaries who couldn’t
find their way from the Haight to Cow Hollow.

I dislike road movies, and bromances. I hope never again to
see anything starring Josh Rogen. Adam Sandler doesn’t make me laugh. I am
deeply unamused by movies about the zany things dudes do when they’ve drunk too
much beer. I find the music of AC/DC tiresome, and have never exclaimed, “Whoo-hoo!” at a concert or other performance.

I have never described anything as awesome. There was a time
when I might have invoked that word in relation to the Grand Canyon, for
instance, but the bros have rendered that untenable.

Dare to defy them, say I. Dare to wear a tie when you don’t
have to! Dare to use apostrophes properly, and to be proud of doing so! Dare to
enjoy the work of Zadie Smith and other female novelists. Cease to care if your
region’s NFL teams is doing well. Describe things you like as marvelous or grand, rather than awesome. Say no to bro!

6 comments:

You didn't miss anything but not being a Cub or Boy Scout. Trust me, they would have quietly hated you, while also secretly thinking you were gay. Hazing at group camp might have been in store, perhaps like lots of the good jobs like digging the slit latrine using the sandy bottom of the local stream to clean the plates of your den brothers. Been down that road.

I believe your initial transgression arose with the mistaking the term "bro" with a dudebro. It is a "Dudebro!" you describe. One who fits all he has under the backwards baseball hat. ^^ Ala 'Jefftey' here. ^^

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I was born a very long time ago, and was still alive at the time of the composition of this brief autobiography. Lots of my music may be savoured at www.soundcloud.com/john-mendelssohn. And do visit my band's Website: freudiansluts.co.uk. Moreover, lots of my fiction is available for download from http://tinyurl.com/7b8e8u6. Finally, lots of my commercial...creative work may be glimpsed at johnmendelssohn.wix.com/jnm-creative.